Few industries are evolving and changing as rapidly as that of the Life Sciences and few comprise as many diverse disciplines as that of the Life Sciences. The diversity of the industry derives not only from the varying areas of science being explored by various companies but also in the business models pursued by such companies to commercialize their scientific discoveries.

Life Science organizations are looking towards technology companies to understand how they can deploy technology innovations, including:

  • Automation, application modernization, and infrastructure landscape to make it lean and agile with an optimized cost blueprint
  • Advanced, Predictive, and Prescriptive Analytics to generate meaningful insights that facilitate decision making
  • Digital Strategies leveraging Internet of Things - IoT, Digital, and Social, Mobile, Analytics an Cloud - SMAC technologies for building highly scalable and connected Digital Health Platforms, which ensure better patient/care-giver connectivity, issue resolution, adherence level improvements, and enhanced brand value and market share.

Life Science organizations require technology expertise in order to continue their research and development, in addition to adapting to changing circumstances, regulatory compliance, achieve their goals.

The vast majority of Life Science organizations do not have sufficient time to spend on different phases of the Information Technology - IT problem-solving journey with corresponding vendors.

Life Science organizations are increasingly on the lookout for truncating this process and want an integrated end-to-end approach with a single vendor to minimize hops, maximize productivity, and accelerate product launches and go-to-market.

We work with a number of leading pharmaceutical companies, adding value to each of these 3 phases:

Discover Phase

We engage with customers in moving beyond the traditional value chain processes and discover problems or consumer-level challenges through a unique‘persona-based’ value discovery exercise.

Design Phase

We deploy the Design Thinking framework, a set of tools and a mindset for problem-solving based on “empathy”. It’s an approach of creatively combining rational, functional, and emotional needs of the users for delivering “Unique User Experiences”. This is based on user’s needs, behaviors,constraints, and operating contexts. Our Design Thinking is powered by a strong combination of Automation, Internet of Things - IoT,  Artificial Intelligence - AI, Machine Learning - ML, and Deep Learning solutions. The focus is more towards re-framing business problems and designing a human-centered and experience-centric platform solution that is both agile and scalable.

Deliver Phase

We follow “platform-centric” and “As-a-Service” delivery models. Additionally, we offer Plug & Play of Products, Application Development and Maintenance, and Hosting & Business Services to deliver more business aligned solutions to customers.

Across Life Sciences, a certain posture toward Information Technology - IT has prevailed for years: “Information Technology - IT doesn’t provide our organization with a competitive advantage, only basic capabilities. We should therefore minimize Information Technology - IT expenses while maintaining an acceptable level of performance.” Budgets are aligned to plans a year in advance, and Information Technology - IT is regarded as a cost center. Since Information Technology - IT is charged to build the technology that the organization asks for, it requires teams of analysts to sit between the organization and Software Developers, Software Engineers, Network Engineers, System Engineers, etc., to translate organizational concepts into the language of technology.

For many years, this posture was pragmatic—and perhaps even necessary. Information Technology - IT organizations had to focus on implementing core Enterprise Resource Planning - ERP systems, untangling siloed Information Technology - IT Infrastructure from years of Mergers and Acquisitions - M&A activity, standardizing processes, and providing basic technology literacy for their business counterparts. This perspective no longer holds for true digital leaders and will not last for the Life Science industries. The mandate coming from boards, CEOs, and business leaders is to aspire to digital excellence. However, without equal attention to Information Technology - IT, these efforts struggle to move from experiments to true change at scale.

The Information Technology - IT function must move closer to the business and customers so companies can meet the rising expectations of end users and seize the powerful first-mover advantages that accrue in digitizing markets. These advantages include unlocking data for better decision making, creating solutions that complement commercial offerings, engaging with customers, and reimagining internal processes. Life Science organizations on a path to lead the pack have a clear strategy that includes ten technology plays—without it, they can only fall further behind.

What Information Technology - IT means for Life Science organizations today in the 21st Century

The wave of digital disruption has now reached the Healthcare sector. While there is still debate around the scale and pace of change this will bring for the industry, there is little doubt that the change is well under way. Several disruptive forces have been pushing this boundary in the Healthcare sector and are changing the way care is provided:

  • Patients are more engaged with their Healthcare and Medical Care and expect the same convenience and transparency for Healthcare services.
  • There is new desire to access and use the data that are already created to provide transparency into product performance.
  • Advanced Analytics, Automation, and Cloud Computing are making it easier to increase productivity and improve the quality of decision making.
  • Digitization has started to move beyond the digital pill to improve outcomes and provide Personalized Medicine.
  • Digital ecosystems are playing an increasingly important role.
  • New, nontraditional tech players are intervening.

The 21st Century journey to Information Technology - IT and Digital Transformation in the Life Science sector

As a result, incumbents need to lean into a new technology-forward strategy to compete with the flexibility and speed of digital natives. Because these trends have been evolving for years, many Life Science organizations started to take steps to address them. For example, companies have elevated the digital agenda to the C-suite, hired Chief Digital Officers - CDOs, Chief Technology Officers - CTOs, Chief Information Security Officers - CISOs, Chief Security Officers - CSOs, etc., and created focused organizations to start experimenting with a laundry list of digital use cases. Despite the recent shifts, the Life Science sector continues to lag behind most industries and is not yet where it needs to be—truly transforming at scale. Therefore, Life Science organizations have to take steps to unlock 21st Century Digital Transformation by modernizing their core Information Technology - IT, which requires fundamental retooling.